The devil is always in the detail. You never *truly* know if an engine is exactly what you want until you're buried in a project. Sad, but true. Even with TrueVision3D, I've had a few scares where I thought what I needed to do might not be possible, only to find an obscure function hidden away in a rarely-used class which enables me to do exactly what I needed.
However, from the feature list and a quick skim of the docs, Horde is Windows only, but has apparently been engineered with cross-platform support in mind. It has good animation support including blending, mixing and morphing. It has native XML formats for materials and shaders, and binary formats for images and animations. It supports Collada, so your art path is unlikely to be too much of a hassle, and as well as a fairly generous license, it has clean API which even ( apparently, I didn't find it ) has a plain-C interface for use with languages like BlitzMax which can't work with C++ classes. ( In other words, it should be a lot less work to wrap it than it was for me to wrap TV3D. )
So yeah, as much as you can ever tell from a website and some docs, it looks nice. Assuming that you have a project in mind which suits the engine. ( EG: It seems particularly optimized for rendering lots of animated models. I would assume that anyone wanting to use it would intend to take advantage of that. )
However, from the feature list and a quick skim of the docs, Horde is Windows only, but has apparently been engineered with cross-platform support in mind. It has good animation support including blending, mixing and morphing. It has native XML formats for materials and shaders, and binary formats for images and animations. It supports Collada, so your art path is unlikely to be too much of a hassle, and as well as a fairly generous license, it has clean API which even ( apparently, I didn't find it ) has a plain-C interface for use with languages like BlitzMax which can't work with C++ classes. ( In other words, it should be a lot less work to wrap it than it was for me to wrap TV3D. )
So yeah, as much as you can ever tell from a website and some docs, it looks nice. Assuming that you have a project in mind which suits the engine. ( EG: It seems particularly optimized for rendering lots of animated models. I would assume that anyone wanting to use it would intend to take advantage of that. )